May 19, 2022 • 23 mins
Katherine Sizov is the founder and CEO of Strella Biotech.
Her problem: Tons of food is wasted before it ever gets to the consumer.
Katherine started working on this problem in 2018, when she was a junior in college. Her idea: imitate the natural world and build a device that detects when fruit is ripening. It worked. Now some of the biggest apple and pear packers in America use her device.
Next up: Avocados.
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Episode Transcript
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Speaker 1 (00:15):
Pushkin. My family is really into fruit. On my kitchen
counter right now is a bowl with apples, pears, bananas,
and a mango, also an avocado technically a fruit. The
avocado and the pears are hard. They're not right yet,
(00:35):
and I'm afraid that if I look away for like
five minutes, they're going to jump straight from hard to rotten.
The bananas are turning brown but still totally edible. And
the apples and the mango they are just right. But
somebody probably better eat that mango today. It's not gonna last. Now.
There is a reason that I'm talking way too much
(00:55):
about my fruit bowl, and that is because it is
really hard to get fruit right. This is not just
a me problem. It is a massive problem for the
whole supply chain, all the way from the time the
fruit gets picked to the time winds up in a
bowl on my counter. It's a huge, multibillion dollar problem.
(01:16):
I'm Jacob Goldstein, and this is What's Your Problem, the
show where entrepreneurs and engineers explain how they're going to
change the world once they solve a few problems. My
guest today is Katherine Sizza. She is the founder and
CEO of Strella Biotech, and the problem Katherine is trying
to solve is this a huge share of the fruit
grown in America goes bad before it even gets to
(01:39):
the consumer. She learned this spect four years ago when
she was a junior at the University of Pennsylvania, and
by the time she graduated in twenty nineteen, she had
both invented a device to detect when fruit is ripening
and started a company to bring that device to market. Today,
her customers include some of the biggest apple and pair
packers in America. To start, can you just sort of
(02:02):
tell me, tell me how you came to start this company. Yeah.
I read a paper that said, of all food is
wasted before it's consumed, which I thought was the most
ridiculous thing I've ever heard of in my entire life.
And then that was quickly followed by guilt because I
was like, I don't even know where the food in
my grocery store comes from. So just after reading that paper,
(02:25):
walk to the grocery store and went up to the
produce manager and said, Hey, where did those peaches come from?
And what did they say? She said, I don't really know.
You should probably talk to the growers and I was like, uh, okay,
I'll go and do that. Realized peaches don't really grow
in Pennsylvania, but what does grow in Pennsylvania is apples.
(02:49):
So went to the apple growers and you're in college
at this point, yep, I was in college. I guess,
uh yeah, I started, you know, taking the train to Lancaster,
Pennsylvania and stuff instead of going to class at some point,
and do you what do you learn? Well? I learned
that an apple at a grocery store can be over
a year old by the time I eat it, like
(03:10):
a year since it's come off the tree. Yeah, yeah,
how does that work? Apples are put into these rooms
that kind of are like outer space where they're deoxygenate
kept very very cold, and in those types of conditions,
the apples can actually survive for that long. And so
why does that become relevant for what you end up doing? Yeah?
(03:31):
So sometimes these rooms are kind of a black box
because they're deoxygenated. A person who stores them, which is
called a packer, they have dozens of these rooms. They're massive,
they're filled with millions of pieces of fruit, and they're
kind of playing a little bit of a guessing game
of behind which door is the most ripe fruit. So
you'll have a room filled with five million apples. That's
(03:53):
a huge, huge room. And then sometimes they'll crack open
that door and all the apples apple sauce. And that's
like a million dollars for that operation in one really
bad day, and that happens. That happens just because they
don't know. They don't know that inside that sealed room
the apples are going bad. Yeah, so you learn all this,
what do you do? So? Uh, you know, my backgrounds
(04:13):
in molecular biology, and I was thinking, well, these are
biological organisms. Maybe we should kind of treat them as such.
Maybe we should listen to them, see what they're telling us,
Like what does that actually mean? As you're learning about this,
like how do you listen to an apple? All the
fruit on a tree ripens at the same time, there's
some sort of evolutionary advantage to this happening. And the
(04:33):
way that produce do this is by communicating with each other.
If you've heard the saying one bad apple spoils the bunch,
it's totally true, and it's because it's telling everybody else,
Hey I'm ripening, Hey I'm going bad, and the way
that they communicate with each other is through gas emissions. Okay,
ethylene right in particular, this gas ethylene, that's right in particular,
(04:55):
athlete ethylene is what just like carbon and hydrogen. It's
just like some boring gas. Yeah, it's uh yeah, I
guess it's kind of boring, but I don't know it's
a big deal, sad word. How would you characterize ethylene?
What's ethylene? Like? Symmetrical? Symmetrical? Very good? Okay, So basically
ethylene is a signal that a ripe apple puts out,
(05:17):
and all of the other apples understand that signal to mean,
oh I better get ripe now too. Yeah. And actually
it's a cross fruit communication as well. So I don't
know if your grandma ever put you know, a tomato
and a banana and a paper bag together to ripen
one of them faster. That's the way to do. Is
(05:38):
they communicate with each other using athlene and they ripe
and faster. Can you just list off the fruits that
communicate using ethylene? Yeah, so some of them are avocados,
apples obviously, bananas, Kiwi's pears getting more exotic, per simmons, tomatoes, Yeah,
a lot of tropical fruits. So you learn all this,
(05:59):
you're reading papers about fruit communication. What do you do? So,
thinking about fruits as a biological organism, let's listen to them,
Let's hear what they're saying through measuring ethylene gas, and
then figure out how ripe they are. I mean, when
you put it that way, it seems kind of obvious, right,
It seems like weird that some college student who got
interested in it would do a thing that nobody had
(06:20):
done before. Had somebody done this before? Why wasn't this
already happening? If not? Yeah? Absolutely, Ethylene has been known
about since the seventies actually, and there are a ton
of awesome universities that have published a lot of studies
on it. It comes down to the technology. So apples
and produce aren't a really messy environment, if you will.
There's a lot of pesticides, treatments, all sorts of things
(06:42):
in that environment, and so it's very hard for a
typical sensor to pick up just that tiny signal that
produce is emitting. So it's hard to measure it. It's
hard to actually do at some level. Yep. But you
set out to do it. You were like, well, maybe
I can figure it out. Yeah, well, I mean coming back,
I only know molecular bio at the end of the day.
(07:03):
So it was like, okay, you know what fruits have
been sensing and signaling athylene for millions of years. Why
don't we is that mechanism that they use? And so
at the end of the day, what we did was
essentially hack a fruit, if you will, and digitize its output,
and then we just convert that into a digital signal
that we can use to predict the ethylene concentration. So
(07:24):
the key idea that you had that maybe nobody had
had before was let's use the same protein that fruit
uses to perceive ethylene in our sensor to pick up ethylene.
Totally evolutionists smarter than we are. Like, is there a
moment there if you figuring it out? Was it easy?
Was it hard? You know? I wish there were kind
(07:45):
of light bulb moments. I think a lot of the
times it's the lightbulb moment is taken over by some
big failure that you have to then co and solve.
And then also when things work, you're like okay, and
you don't realize that. You go eat a burrito or
whatever and don't realize that this was a big moment. Yeah,
were there any eating a burrito moments that you didn't
(08:06):
realize that the time, we're big moments, but that looking back,
you're like, oh, that was actually a big moment. Yeah. Absolutely,
it was. So the first year that we put sensors
in the real world just to see what happened. We
were getting really nice data and I had kind of
downloaded it and put it in Excel and looked at
it and saw like really nice ethylene curve. I was like,
(08:26):
that looks great, and then I went to go eat
a burrito. And then a couple of weeks later, the
person whose room we had put the censor and said,
you know what, you saved me six hundred thousand dollars
this year. I would have totally opened that room way
late and had apple sauce apple. So it's like like
six hundred thousand dollars worth of apples would have gone bad,
(08:47):
would have spoiled. Yeah, that's right. This is around the
time you started the company. You started the company before
your senior year of college, and then did you finish
school as you were building the company. I did finish school,
namely because the school I went to had an entrepreneurial
prize that if I was still a senior I could
(09:08):
apply for and get money. So basically, you stayed in
school in order to fund your business. That's right. I
mean I was paying a lot of tuition. Got to
make them money back somehow, And did it work? Yeah?
It did. By the time I graduated, we had received
over half a million dollars of just money through pitch
competitions and things like that. Well, if you got half
(09:28):
a million, I mean, I know tuition is expensive, but
I feel like you must have made a profit on
college if you got five hundred thousand. Yeah, I think so,
I hope, So, I hope. So Okay, So this isn't
that long ago. This is like a few years ago,
Like where are you today? Tell me about the company today.
So today we are fifteen folks, fifteen the smartest people
(09:49):
I've ever met. We work with seventy two percent of
all the Apple and Pair folks. And now we're expanding
into other parts of the market, whether that's different commodities
or different parts of the supply chain like retail and imports.
And how does it work as a business, Like do
you sell them your devices? Or is it like a
subscription and like more or less how much do they pay?
(10:11):
Frankly speaking, our customers are way too busy to worry
about something like ethylene, and they certainly don't have time
to interpret a sensor or a reading. So the most
important thing for us is the decision that we help
them make, which is which room to open first? So
our business model reflects that. So we just charge a
subscription service where you get access to Stralla monitoring per
(10:32):
room per year. Also in this industry, usually instead of
looking at a dashboard and making a decision, our customers
call us and say, hey, I'm about to open a
room full of galas, which one should I do? That
is old school. They call you like on your cell yeah,
and like more or less? How big is your business now?
Just like order of magnitude? How much revenue do you have?
(10:53):
Can I not say? Yeah? You can not say that? Like,
what's another way of talking about it? Yeah? So we
charge five thousand dollars per room per year, and today
we've monitored over two billion pieces of fruit, more than
two billion pieces of fruit, mostly apples and papers. After
the break the next frontier avocados, I'm gonna be honest,
(11:16):
I got a lot of skin in the avocado game.
Steaks are very high from me on this one. That's
the end of the ads. Now we're going back to
the show. The place where you started is apples and
pears when they're in this kind of long term storage
(11:37):
in a sealed room, right, Like, that's the sort of
problem you have solved so far. What is the next
problem you're trying to solve? So the next problem is
the further you go down the chain, the less information
you have. So by the time you get to our retailer,
they're not experts in apples or keyways or pairs. And
that's the most kind of saddest part of it, right,
All this time, money, resources were spent to get this
(12:00):
piece of fruit to the shelf and then it goes
bad there. That's like the worst part. Almost made it.
We went so far totally, And obviously that's a huge
business impact too, right, because the retailer is spending a
huge amount of money getting this stuff there and then
it's going bad right at the last minute. Yeah, So
how do you solve that? It's super hard. I mean
there's a lot of there's a lot of things we're
(12:21):
still working on like implementation. So for example, we've sat
with apples for six to eight months sometimes before they
got to the retailer, and so we can use that
same data that we collected using that sensor to inform
the retailer. But the question is, you know, is a
supplier cool with that? What if you know what's in it? Like,
how do we integrate into a retailer? Right, We're working
(12:44):
with huge, massive dinosaur systems that are sometimes not really
conducive to adding information. So you're saying the problem in
sort of moving your business to different parts of the
supply chain is not the technical problem, like not sensing
ethylene when it's not a sealed room or whatever. It's
just dealing with like the supplier's relationship with the retailer
and the retailer software. It's like the non technical piece
(13:06):
that's actually the problem. Oh, technical pieces problems too, Right.
You know, we're going from environments that are literally called
controlled atmosphere. You know, that's the best place to put
a piece of technology, right because because the sealed room
is so controlled, like, it's really easy, relatively speaking, to
perceive a change in the level of ethylene. Right, It's
like the perfect place to do it, and then you're
(13:27):
out in the real world and there's weird things happening
and there's different kinds of fruits and they're opening the
box and they're closing the box and whatever, and like
does that mess up your sensing system? Yeah? Absolutely, I
mean we have to put a lot more math behind it.
We have to have way bigger data sets that we
collect to make sure that we're actually making the right decision.
And is that something you haven't quite cracked yet, the
(13:47):
sort of beyond the sealed room piece of it. So
we're working in Kiwi's right now, So we're cracking Kiwis
and then we're looking right now into bananas and avocados.
Let's talk about avocados. I feel like avocados are perhaps
unique in the fruit world in the amount of frustration
they generate for consumers. So I think if you could
(14:08):
crack avocados, that would be that would be a huge
breakthrough for me. I spend a lot on avocados, and
often they're not good even if I get them under ripe.
Somehow I miss the magic moment when they are ripe,
Like they go from hard to black on the inside,
and I never even knew. So tell me where you
(14:29):
are on avocados, Like, what's happening with your business and avocados. Yeah,
So what we're doing in avocados is they have a
little bit of a different supply chain than apples. So
apples are picked basically ready from the tree. Avocados are
picked underripe from a tree, and then they're shipped into
the US, for example, and they're artificially ripened actually using
(14:49):
that ethylene gas. So you put a bunch of underripe
avocados into a room and then you dose them with ethylene.
So similar to where the apples are stored, avocados are ripened.
And so what we do is we put our technology
inside these ripening rooms and we're able to better control
that ripening process. So the fruit is dosed awakened with ethylene,
if you will, and then it starts producing athlene on
(15:11):
its own. And so we capture those signals and we're
able to tell, hey, this guy is ready to go.
You know, it's time to send them down the chain.
But this one isn't quite there yet. Maybe we do
another treatment. Maybe we expose it to a little bit
of heat or temperature to get that ripening process going
and that way create a more consistent product at the
end of the day. Is that like the dream or
is that what you can already do? No, that's the dream.
(15:32):
That's what we're working on right now. Tell me why
it's hard. So avocados they ripen a lot faster. So
we're sitting with apples and pairs for a very long
time months, but avocados ripen in a matter of days.
And so that's kind of a really big challenge that
we're working on addressing right now, is having a sensor
that reacts super quickly to those gas emissions and is
(15:54):
able to quickly predict out what's going on. And so
it's basically you have to make predictions with less data,
which is hard for kind of obvious statistical reasons. Yeah,
and also, our whole sensor technology is designed around like
a slow, long process and now we're going into a
quick opening process. Like what part of it do you
(16:15):
have to improve to solve avocados. One of the problems
is sensitivity, so upping our sensitivity and the algorithms as well.
So in our storage rooms we collect once an hour,
for example, and we have to absolutely increase the amount
of data that we're ingesting in order to be able
to make a prediction in such a short period of time.
(16:35):
So in control the atmosphere, rooms is kind of sitting
there and be only measuring things. And that's cool when
you have months, but when you're dealing with a really
quick turn avocado, you have to kind of change that
process going from months to day's basically is it basically
exactly like you're almost there. I think the targets are
(16:56):
always moving, right, Like you get one thing done and
then a customer is like, well, let's make it do
this other thing. So it's moving goalposts, which I think
is always the hardest thing because sometimes you feel like
you've never gotten anywhere. I mean, let me ask you
a different way. Is most most of your business now
apples and pairs, like most of your revenue. Yep, most
of our revenues and apples and pairs, But our customer
(17:16):
segments are different. So we've got the packers who we
work with in storage rooms, We've got importers who's shipping
containers we monitor, and then we've got retailers so we
help them organize their inventory and always send the best
quality stuff to the shelf. Is there ever going to
be a day when you'll sell me your service. Basically,
(17:36):
I'll buy some little mini brick and put it in
my bowl of avocados and get a text on my
cell phone when it's time to eat an avocado. That's
a great question. I think the future could look like
your fridge, for example, telling you that something's going bad
in there. But you know, the further you go down
the chain, the cheaper. It's got to be more developed.
(17:58):
The technology has to be which is why we started
upstream right, because if you're monitoring millions of pieces of fruit,
you have the ability to have an R and D
budget included in your margin if you will right, you
have to be able to make something for like a
dollar that can perceive four avocados, which is way harder
than making something for what hundreds of dollars built to
perceive a million avocados exactly. So you think you'll get there?
(18:22):
I think so, yeah. I got time. A started earlier
in a minute the Lightning Round, including Catherine's tips for
solving hard problems and a discussion of underrated fruit. Okay,
(18:46):
let's get back to the show. We're gonna close with
the Lightning Round. How do you feel about doing just
a bunch of quick fun questions? Sounds good. What's one
piece of advice you'd give to someone trying to solve
a hard problem? Take the risk, just do it small steps.
Just figure out how to take that huge problem and
break it down into something that you can do today.
(19:09):
It's really about just every single day. What is a
difficult problem you're working on today? Then? How do I
get a retailer to pay me? Okay, good one? How
do you get a retailer to pay you? You could
change them on my podcast? Do you want to say
the name of the retailer that's not paying you? Oh? No, no, no, no,
(19:29):
no no no no, I can't. I'm not there yet.
Maybe like when I'm Elon Musk, I can like talk
shit about like big companies. So you started this company
when you were still in college, and you've grown it
and it's a real company now. One is one tip
you would give to other young women trying to start
companies or just trying to get people to listen to
(19:51):
their ideas. Oh that's a good question. So take whatever
attention you get and use it to pitch your product.
You know sometimes Eddie, you know, whatever, attention you get
if you're sticking out in a room. Use it to
your advantage and get people to buy into your technology
and you're offering and understand how you're impacting their business
in a good way. What is the most underrated fruit? Mangoes?
(20:15):
Mangoes are the best? Agree? Do they talk to each
other with ethylene? They do talk to each other with
ethylene and mangoes kind of like the hot girl on
the block right now, So expect more mangoes in the future.
Tell me more. It's the new it fruit. Yes, So
they're trying to actually ripen them similarly to avocados, and
so they're looking at it as a really big, you know,
(20:38):
commodity that's going to grow in the future. We love
mangoes in my house. What's the most overrated fruit? Banana?
There are way better varieties of bananas that we could
be eating. The one that we are used to is
definitely not the best one out there. Why aren't we
eating better bananas? Then that's a really good question. Why
(20:59):
are we still eating red delicious apples? We're just going
to ask you about red delicious apples? Why are we
still eating red delicious apples? They are so gross. When
I was a kid, that was like all you could get,
and now we have this whole wonderful world of apples. Well,
like what happened, Red Delicious apples are a supply chain product.
Those things can sit on your shelf for decades and
they can do the same thing in the supply chain.
(21:19):
So Red Delicious is a good example of we have
a lot of problems in our supply chain, and so
we're going to solve that with a really hardy variety
that might not necessarily be the best to eat, but
something we can transport pie or crumble pie. What about
you if I'm cooking crumble because like, I don't want
(21:40):
to deal with making a crust if I'm eating piem
that makes sense. It's hard to make a crust. I'm
intimidated by making a crust. It's so hard to make
a crust. If everything goes well, what's a problem you'll
be trying to solve in five years saying e commerce?
How do we get a perfect avocado simply by ordering
(22:01):
it online? Uh? I mean, produce is a very personal thing,
and you're kind of entrusting that to someone you've never met,
which is part of the reason why brick and mortar
store still exists, is for produce. Do you think you'll
ever leave Strella go work on some other problem? Yeah.
I started Estrella as something that I thought I could
(22:22):
accomplish while still in college. There were other ideas that
I've had that just require more capital and experience and knowledge,
and so I think, I think I want to be
a serial entrepreneur in the future. What do you want
to do next? Jerry's still out on that one. Katherine
(22:43):
Sizzov is the founder and CEO of Strella Biotech. Today's
show was produced by Edith Russolo, edited by Robert Smith,
and engineered by Amanda k. Wong. You can reach us
at problem at Pushkin dot FM, or you can find
me on Twitter at Jacob Goldstein. I'm Jacob Goldstein and
(23:03):
I'll be back next week with another episode of What's
Your Problem.
Pushkin. My family is really into fruit. On my kitchen
counter right now is a bowl with apples, pears, bananas,
and a mango, also an avocado technically a fruit. The
avocado and the pears are hard. They're not right yet,
(00:35):
and I'm afraid that if I look away for like
five minutes, they're going to jump straight from hard to rotten.
The bananas are turning brown but still totally edible. And
the apples and the mango they are just right. But
somebody probably better eat that mango today. It's not gonna last. Now.
There is a reason that I'm talking way too much
(00:55):
about my fruit bowl, and that is because it is
really hard to get fruit right. This is not just
a me problem. It is a massive problem for the
whole supply chain, all the way from the time the
fruit gets picked to the time winds up in a
bowl on my counter. It's a huge, multibillion dollar problem.
(01:16):
I'm Jacob Goldstein, and this is What's Your Problem, the
show where entrepreneurs and engineers explain how they're going to
change the world once they solve a few problems. My
guest today is Katherine Sizza. She is the founder and
CEO of Strella Biotech, and the problem Katherine is trying
to solve is this a huge share of the fruit
grown in America goes bad before it even gets to
(01:39):
the consumer. She learned this spect four years ago when
she was a junior at the University of Pennsylvania, and
by the time she graduated in twenty nineteen, she had
both invented a device to detect when fruit is ripening
and started a company to bring that device to market. Today,
her customers include some of the biggest apple and pair
packers in America. To start, can you just sort of
(02:02):
tell me, tell me how you came to start this company. Yeah.
I read a paper that said, of all food is
wasted before it's consumed, which I thought was the most
ridiculous thing I've ever heard of in my entire life.
And then that was quickly followed by guilt because I
was like, I don't even know where the food in
my grocery store comes from. So just after reading that paper,
(02:25):
walk to the grocery store and went up to the
produce manager and said, Hey, where did those peaches come from?
And what did they say? She said, I don't really know.
You should probably talk to the growers and I was like, uh, okay,
I'll go and do that. Realized peaches don't really grow
in Pennsylvania, but what does grow in Pennsylvania is apples.
(02:49):
So went to the apple growers and you're in college
at this point, yep, I was in college. I guess,
uh yeah, I started, you know, taking the train to Lancaster,
Pennsylvania and stuff instead of going to class at some point,
and do you what do you learn? Well? I learned
that an apple at a grocery store can be over
a year old by the time I eat it, like
(03:10):
a year since it's come off the tree. Yeah, yeah,
how does that work? Apples are put into these rooms
that kind of are like outer space where they're deoxygenate
kept very very cold, and in those types of conditions,
the apples can actually survive for that long. And so
why does that become relevant for what you end up doing? Yeah?
(03:31):
So sometimes these rooms are kind of a black box
because they're deoxygenated. A person who stores them, which is
called a packer, they have dozens of these rooms. They're massive,
they're filled with millions of pieces of fruit, and they're
kind of playing a little bit of a guessing game
of behind which door is the most ripe fruit. So
you'll have a room filled with five million apples. That's
(03:53):
a huge, huge room. And then sometimes they'll crack open
that door and all the apples apple sauce. And that's
like a million dollars for that operation in one really
bad day, and that happens. That happens just because they
don't know. They don't know that inside that sealed room
the apples are going bad. Yeah, so you learn all this,
what do you do? So? Uh, you know, my backgrounds
(04:13):
in molecular biology, and I was thinking, well, these are
biological organisms. Maybe we should kind of treat them as such.
Maybe we should listen to them, see what they're telling us,
Like what does that actually mean? As you're learning about this,
like how do you listen to an apple? All the
fruit on a tree ripens at the same time, there's
some sort of evolutionary advantage to this happening. And the
(04:33):
way that produce do this is by communicating with each other.
If you've heard the saying one bad apple spoils the bunch,
it's totally true, and it's because it's telling everybody else,
Hey I'm ripening, Hey I'm going bad, and the way
that they communicate with each other is through gas emissions. Okay,
ethylene right in particular, this gas ethylene, that's right in particular,
(04:55):
athlete ethylene is what just like carbon and hydrogen. It's
just like some boring gas. Yeah, it's uh yeah, I
guess it's kind of boring, but I don't know it's
a big deal, sad word. How would you characterize ethylene?
What's ethylene? Like? Symmetrical? Symmetrical? Very good? Okay, So basically
ethylene is a signal that a ripe apple puts out,
(05:17):
and all of the other apples understand that signal to mean,
oh I better get ripe now too. Yeah. And actually
it's a cross fruit communication as well. So I don't
know if your grandma ever put you know, a tomato
and a banana and a paper bag together to ripen
one of them faster. That's the way to do. Is
(05:38):
they communicate with each other using athlene and they ripe
and faster. Can you just list off the fruits that
communicate using ethylene? Yeah, so some of them are avocados,
apples obviously, bananas, Kiwi's pears getting more exotic, per simmons, tomatoes, Yeah,
a lot of tropical fruits. So you learn all this,
(05:59):
you're reading papers about fruit communication. What do you do? So,
thinking about fruits as a biological organism, let's listen to them,
Let's hear what they're saying through measuring ethylene gas, and
then figure out how ripe they are. I mean, when
you put it that way, it seems kind of obvious, right,
It seems like weird that some college student who got
interested in it would do a thing that nobody had
(06:20):
done before. Had somebody done this before? Why wasn't this
already happening? If not? Yeah? Absolutely, Ethylene has been known
about since the seventies actually, and there are a ton
of awesome universities that have published a lot of studies
on it. It comes down to the technology. So apples
and produce aren't a really messy environment, if you will.
There's a lot of pesticides, treatments, all sorts of things
(06:42):
in that environment, and so it's very hard for a
typical sensor to pick up just that tiny signal that
produce is emitting. So it's hard to measure it. It's
hard to actually do at some level. Yep. But you
set out to do it. You were like, well, maybe
I can figure it out. Yeah, well, I mean coming back,
I only know molecular bio at the end of the day.
(07:03):
So it was like, okay, you know what fruits have
been sensing and signaling athylene for millions of years. Why
don't we is that mechanism that they use? And so
at the end of the day, what we did was
essentially hack a fruit, if you will, and digitize its output,
and then we just convert that into a digital signal
that we can use to predict the ethylene concentration. So
(07:24):
the key idea that you had that maybe nobody had
had before was let's use the same protein that fruit
uses to perceive ethylene in our sensor to pick up ethylene.
Totally evolutionists smarter than we are. Like, is there a
moment there if you figuring it out? Was it easy?
Was it hard? You know? I wish there were kind
(07:45):
of light bulb moments. I think a lot of the
times it's the lightbulb moment is taken over by some
big failure that you have to then co and solve.
And then also when things work, you're like okay, and
you don't realize that. You go eat a burrito or
whatever and don't realize that this was a big moment. Yeah,
were there any eating a burrito moments that you didn't
(08:06):
realize that the time, we're big moments, but that looking back,
you're like, oh, that was actually a big moment. Yeah. Absolutely,
it was. So the first year that we put sensors
in the real world just to see what happened. We
were getting really nice data and I had kind of
downloaded it and put it in Excel and looked at
it and saw like really nice ethylene curve. I was like,
(08:26):
that looks great, and then I went to go eat
a burrito. And then a couple of weeks later, the
person whose room we had put the censor and said,
you know what, you saved me six hundred thousand dollars
this year. I would have totally opened that room way
late and had apple sauce apple. So it's like like
six hundred thousand dollars worth of apples would have gone bad,
(08:47):
would have spoiled. Yeah, that's right. This is around the
time you started the company. You started the company before
your senior year of college, and then did you finish
school as you were building the company. I did finish school,
namely because the school I went to had an entrepreneurial
prize that if I was still a senior I could
(09:08):
apply for and get money. So basically, you stayed in
school in order to fund your business. That's right. I
mean I was paying a lot of tuition. Got to
make them money back somehow, And did it work? Yeah?
It did. By the time I graduated, we had received
over half a million dollars of just money through pitch
competitions and things like that. Well, if you got half
(09:28):
a million, I mean, I know tuition is expensive, but
I feel like you must have made a profit on
college if you got five hundred thousand. Yeah, I think so,
I hope, So, I hope. So Okay, So this isn't
that long ago. This is like a few years ago,
Like where are you today? Tell me about the company today.
So today we are fifteen folks, fifteen the smartest people
(09:49):
I've ever met. We work with seventy two percent of
all the Apple and Pair folks. And now we're expanding
into other parts of the market, whether that's different commodities
or different parts of the supply chain like retail and imports.
And how does it work as a business, Like do
you sell them your devices? Or is it like a
subscription and like more or less how much do they pay?
(10:11):
Frankly speaking, our customers are way too busy to worry
about something like ethylene, and they certainly don't have time
to interpret a sensor or a reading. So the most
important thing for us is the decision that we help
them make, which is which room to open first? So
our business model reflects that. So we just charge a
subscription service where you get access to Stralla monitoring per
(10:32):
room per year. Also in this industry, usually instead of
looking at a dashboard and making a decision, our customers
call us and say, hey, I'm about to open a
room full of galas, which one should I do? That
is old school. They call you like on your cell yeah,
and like more or less? How big is your business now?
Just like order of magnitude? How much revenue do you have?
(10:53):
Can I not say? Yeah? You can not say that? Like,
what's another way of talking about it? Yeah? So we
charge five thousand dollars per room per year, and today
we've monitored over two billion pieces of fruit, more than
two billion pieces of fruit, mostly apples and papers. After
the break the next frontier avocados, I'm gonna be honest,
(11:16):
I got a lot of skin in the avocado game.
Steaks are very high from me on this one. That's
the end of the ads. Now we're going back to
the show. The place where you started is apples and
pears when they're in this kind of long term storage
(11:37):
in a sealed room, right, Like, that's the sort of
problem you have solved so far. What is the next
problem you're trying to solve? So the next problem is
the further you go down the chain, the less information
you have. So by the time you get to our retailer,
they're not experts in apples or keyways or pairs. And
that's the most kind of saddest part of it, right,
All this time, money, resources were spent to get this
(12:00):
piece of fruit to the shelf and then it goes
bad there. That's like the worst part. Almost made it.
We went so far totally, And obviously that's a huge
business impact too, right, because the retailer is spending a
huge amount of money getting this stuff there and then
it's going bad right at the last minute. Yeah, So
how do you solve that? It's super hard. I mean
there's a lot of there's a lot of things we're
(12:21):
still working on like implementation. So for example, we've sat
with apples for six to eight months sometimes before they
got to the retailer, and so we can use that
same data that we collected using that sensor to inform
the retailer. But the question is, you know, is a
supplier cool with that? What if you know what's in it? Like,
how do we integrate into a retailer? Right, We're working
(12:44):
with huge, massive dinosaur systems that are sometimes not really
conducive to adding information. So you're saying the problem in
sort of moving your business to different parts of the
supply chain is not the technical problem, like not sensing
ethylene when it's not a sealed room or whatever. It's
just dealing with like the supplier's relationship with the retailer
and the retailer software. It's like the non technical piece
(13:06):
that's actually the problem. Oh, technical pieces problems too, Right.
You know, we're going from environments that are literally called
controlled atmosphere. You know, that's the best place to put
a piece of technology, right because because the sealed room
is so controlled, like, it's really easy, relatively speaking, to
perceive a change in the level of ethylene. Right, It's
like the perfect place to do it, and then you're
(13:27):
out in the real world and there's weird things happening
and there's different kinds of fruits and they're opening the
box and they're closing the box and whatever, and like
does that mess up your sensing system? Yeah? Absolutely, I
mean we have to put a lot more math behind it.
We have to have way bigger data sets that we
collect to make sure that we're actually making the right decision.
And is that something you haven't quite cracked yet, the
(13:47):
sort of beyond the sealed room piece of it. So
we're working in Kiwi's right now, So we're cracking Kiwis
and then we're looking right now into bananas and avocados.
Let's talk about avocados. I feel like avocados are perhaps
unique in the fruit world in the amount of frustration
they generate for consumers. So I think if you could
(14:08):
crack avocados, that would be that would be a huge
breakthrough for me. I spend a lot on avocados, and
often they're not good even if I get them under ripe.
Somehow I miss the magic moment when they are ripe,
Like they go from hard to black on the inside,
and I never even knew. So tell me where you
(14:29):
are on avocados, Like, what's happening with your business and avocados. Yeah,
So what we're doing in avocados is they have a
little bit of a different supply chain than apples. So
apples are picked basically ready from the tree. Avocados are
picked underripe from a tree, and then they're shipped into
the US, for example, and they're artificially ripened actually using
(14:49):
that ethylene gas. So you put a bunch of underripe
avocados into a room and then you dose them with ethylene.
So similar to where the apples are stored, avocados are ripened.
And so what we do is we put our technology
inside these ripening rooms and we're able to better control
that ripening process. So the fruit is dosed awakened with ethylene,
if you will, and then it starts producing athlene on
(15:11):
its own. And so we capture those signals and we're
able to tell, hey, this guy is ready to go.
You know, it's time to send them down the chain.
But this one isn't quite there yet. Maybe we do
another treatment. Maybe we expose it to a little bit
of heat or temperature to get that ripening process going
and that way create a more consistent product at the
end of the day. Is that like the dream or
is that what you can already do? No, that's the dream.
(15:32):
That's what we're working on right now. Tell me why
it's hard. So avocados they ripen a lot faster. So
we're sitting with apples and pairs for a very long
time months, but avocados ripen in a matter of days.
And so that's kind of a really big challenge that
we're working on addressing right now, is having a sensor
that reacts super quickly to those gas emissions and is
(15:54):
able to quickly predict out what's going on. And so
it's basically you have to make predictions with less data,
which is hard for kind of obvious statistical reasons. Yeah,
and also, our whole sensor technology is designed around like
a slow, long process and now we're going into a
quick opening process. Like what part of it do you
(16:15):
have to improve to solve avocados. One of the problems
is sensitivity, so upping our sensitivity and the algorithms as well.
So in our storage rooms we collect once an hour,
for example, and we have to absolutely increase the amount
of data that we're ingesting in order to be able
to make a prediction in such a short period of time.
(16:35):
So in control the atmosphere, rooms is kind of sitting
there and be only measuring things. And that's cool when
you have months, but when you're dealing with a really
quick turn avocado, you have to kind of change that
process going from months to day's basically is it basically
exactly like you're almost there. I think the targets are
(16:56):
always moving, right, Like you get one thing done and
then a customer is like, well, let's make it do
this other thing. So it's moving goalposts, which I think
is always the hardest thing because sometimes you feel like
you've never gotten anywhere. I mean, let me ask you
a different way. Is most most of your business now
apples and pairs, like most of your revenue. Yep, most
of our revenues and apples and pairs, But our customer
(17:16):
segments are different. So we've got the packers who we
work with in storage rooms, We've got importers who's shipping
containers we monitor, and then we've got retailers so we
help them organize their inventory and always send the best
quality stuff to the shelf. Is there ever going to
be a day when you'll sell me your service. Basically,
(17:36):
I'll buy some little mini brick and put it in
my bowl of avocados and get a text on my
cell phone when it's time to eat an avocado. That's
a great question. I think the future could look like
your fridge, for example, telling you that something's going bad
in there. But you know, the further you go down
the chain, the cheaper. It's got to be more developed.
(17:58):
The technology has to be which is why we started
upstream right, because if you're monitoring millions of pieces of fruit,
you have the ability to have an R and D
budget included in your margin if you will right, you
have to be able to make something for like a
dollar that can perceive four avocados, which is way harder
than making something for what hundreds of dollars built to
perceive a million avocados exactly. So you think you'll get there?
(18:22):
I think so, yeah. I got time. A started earlier
in a minute the Lightning Round, including Catherine's tips for
solving hard problems and a discussion of underrated fruit. Okay,
(18:46):
let's get back to the show. We're gonna close with
the Lightning Round. How do you feel about doing just
a bunch of quick fun questions? Sounds good. What's one
piece of advice you'd give to someone trying to solve
a hard problem? Take the risk, just do it small steps.
Just figure out how to take that huge problem and
break it down into something that you can do today.
(19:09):
It's really about just every single day. What is a
difficult problem you're working on today? Then? How do I
get a retailer to pay me? Okay, good one? How
do you get a retailer to pay you? You could
change them on my podcast? Do you want to say
the name of the retailer that's not paying you? Oh? No, no, no, no,
(19:29):
no no no no, I can't. I'm not there yet.
Maybe like when I'm Elon Musk, I can like talk
shit about like big companies. So you started this company
when you were still in college, and you've grown it
and it's a real company now. One is one tip
you would give to other young women trying to start
companies or just trying to get people to listen to
(19:51):
their ideas. Oh that's a good question. So take whatever
attention you get and use it to pitch your product.
You know sometimes Eddie, you know, whatever, attention you get
if you're sticking out in a room. Use it to
your advantage and get people to buy into your technology
and you're offering and understand how you're impacting their business
in a good way. What is the most underrated fruit? Mangoes?
(20:15):
Mangoes are the best? Agree? Do they talk to each
other with ethylene? They do talk to each other with
ethylene and mangoes kind of like the hot girl on
the block right now, So expect more mangoes in the future.
Tell me more. It's the new it fruit. Yes, So
they're trying to actually ripen them similarly to avocados, and
so they're looking at it as a really big, you know,
(20:38):
commodity that's going to grow in the future. We love
mangoes in my house. What's the most overrated fruit? Banana?
There are way better varieties of bananas that we could
be eating. The one that we are used to is
definitely not the best one out there. Why aren't we
eating better bananas? Then that's a really good question. Why
(20:59):
are we still eating red delicious apples? We're just going
to ask you about red delicious apples? Why are we
still eating red delicious apples? They are so gross. When
I was a kid, that was like all you could get,
and now we have this whole wonderful world of apples. Well,
like what happened, Red Delicious apples are a supply chain product.
Those things can sit on your shelf for decades and
they can do the same thing in the supply chain.
(21:19):
So Red Delicious is a good example of we have
a lot of problems in our supply chain, and so
we're going to solve that with a really hardy variety
that might not necessarily be the best to eat, but
something we can transport pie or crumble pie. What about
you if I'm cooking crumble because like, I don't want
(21:40):
to deal with making a crust if I'm eating piem
that makes sense. It's hard to make a crust. I'm
intimidated by making a crust. It's so hard to make
a crust. If everything goes well, what's a problem you'll
be trying to solve in five years saying e commerce?
How do we get a perfect avocado simply by ordering
(22:01):
it online? Uh? I mean, produce is a very personal thing,
and you're kind of entrusting that to someone you've never met,
which is part of the reason why brick and mortar
store still exists, is for produce. Do you think you'll
ever leave Strella go work on some other problem? Yeah.
I started Estrella as something that I thought I could
(22:22):
accomplish while still in college. There were other ideas that
I've had that just require more capital and experience and knowledge,
and so I think, I think I want to be
a serial entrepreneur in the future. What do you want
to do next? Jerry's still out on that one. Katherine
(22:43):
Sizzov is the founder and CEO of Strella Biotech. Today's
show was produced by Edith Russolo, edited by Robert Smith,
and engineered by Amanda k. Wong. You can reach us
at problem at Pushkin dot FM, or you can find
me on Twitter at Jacob Goldstein. I'm Jacob Goldstein and
(23:03):
I'll be back next week with another episode of What's
Your Problem.
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